A gaming environment creates a fantasy world within which a player can immerse himself or herself. The player exists within the fantasy world in the form of a character that interactively participates in unfolding events of the fantasy world. The actions undertaken by the character, as dictated by the player, affect and shape events in the fantasy world. These events may be continually occurring in real time whether or not that player is playing the fantasy world. As such, just as in reality, a player in a fantasy world can develop his or her character in order to reach certain goals as set forth within the context of the gaming environment.
The character can be perceived as an extension of the player. As such, these games in some circles are also referred to as role playing games (RPG). The player can select many roles within which to exist in the fantasy world. For example, within one RPG that is associated with one gaming environment, the player may decide his or her character to be a knight, a peasant, a sorceress, or any number of male and female characters.
Moreover, many RPGs are configured to have multiple players simultaneously interacting within the gaming environment. For RPGs that support multiple players, the players can be coupled together through any network. For example, players can be coupled together through a geographically limited local area network (LAN), or a network that has a wider geographic scope, such as a wide area network (WAN), or even the Internet. As such, on-line gaming provides for a gaming environment that can encompass a few players, or millions of players.
The player's experience is an important feature within an RPG. The closer a player's experience is to reality, the better the experience. That is, RPGs are continually trying to enhance interactions within the gaming environment to portray the most realistic experience for the player. For example, the reality created within the gaming environment is personified through the character for the associated player. At present, the characters are graphically based avatars that represent the player within the gaming environment. The graphically based avatars of the prior art comprise geometric avatars that have been generated and modeled by an artist in advance. As such, the graphically based avatars are essentially character models. Within a multi-player RPG, a player views other players through their avatars. Additionally, players can adversely or cooperatively interact with each other within the gaming environment. That is, certain players become adversaries or become partners. For example, in a multi-player gaming environment, a player can team up with other players, or fight against other players or computer generated characters.
However, avatars in the form of character models limit the realism strived for by the gaming experience. Response times for the character models are not real-time, and in a visual sense, the character models do not promote a sense of realism. The generated character models that portray themselves to other players through stored renditions of the character are limited to the pre-designed and developed character actions. For example, emotions of the character model are determined by typed commands by the player dictating which emotion the avatar should portray to other players. By typing the commands for emotion, the element of real-time expression and action is lost both through a translation and selection of emotion by the player and through the time lag needed to type in the commands.
Additionally, these emotions are canned facial features that are incorporated into the character model and then portrayed to the other players. That is, the canned facial features are predetermined, predesigned, and prestored facial features accessible for use in the character model. As a result, emotions are limited by the number of canned facial features and emotions that are developed and stored in memory. As such, the realism experienced by the player is limited by the reliance on character models to personify the player within the gaming environment.
As another example, eye contact as an extension of reality that is portrayed through character models also suffers from a similar lack of realism. Eye contact between players can be an effective form of communication. Trust, mistrust, fear, anger, and a whole host of other emotions can be conveyed to other players through eye contact, or the deliberate avoidance of eye contact. However, eye contact that is portrayed through character models between players is not fully realistic, since a player is not truly viewing the other player in person, but a previously created character model representation of that other player. As such, determining the true emotion experienced between players is difficult since players can hide their true and realistic emotions by typing false emotions to be portrayed by their avatars within the gaming environment.
Therefore, prior art methods of providing gaming environments are limited to graphically based avatars for effecting the gaming experience. As such, further enhancement of the gaming experience is limited by these graphically based avatars as they are unable to realistically show real-time emotional states of players within the gaming environment. Thus, what is needed is a technique for enhancing the gaming experience through more realistic representations of a player in a gaming environment.